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President Barack Obama—now eight months into his second term—said today that the U.S. economy is “still trying to recover” from events that took place five years ago before he took office. At the same time, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), which dates the beginning and ending of recessions in the U.S. economy, insists that the last recession ended more than four years ago. … According to the NBER, the last recession began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009. Since June 2009, which was the fifth full month of Obama’s presidency, the economy has been in a...

Political Earthquake Coming, Where Is The Economic Recovery? Economics / Recession 2008 - 2010 Apr 15, 2010 - 02:46 AM By: Gary North "Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who's to say the economy has stopped its fall?" "The NBER, dummy!" The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is a private, nonprofit organization. Begun in 1920, it has focused on collecting and analyzing economic data on the U.S. economy. It is nonpartisan. Sixteen of the past 31 American economists who have received the Nobel Prize have been members of the NBER. It is noted by the precision of its research and...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It is too soon to determine when the U.S. recession ended, the arbiter of U.S. business cycles said on Monday. "Although most indicators have turned up, the committee decided that the determination of the trough date on the basis of current data would be premature," the National Bureau of Economic Research said in a statement. "Many indicators are quite preliminary at this time and will be revised in coming months," the group said. The NBER said its business cycle dating committee, a group of economists that pinpoints when recessions begin and end, had met on April 8...

Indicators: As if we weren't in enough of a funk, the National Bureau of Economic Research now tells us a recession started 12 months ago. Don't forget, though, that NBER could be just as long in pegging its end. The NBER's sudden verdict no doubt came as a jolt to those who had held off using the "R" until they saw two straight quarters of negative GDP. But did that justify going the bureau one better by predicting things are going to get a lot worse? We only just started. I can't see bottoming out until sometime in 2010," said...

The National Bureau of Economic Research, the official caller of recessions, recently said we are now in a recession that started one year ago, in December 2007. "The committee determined that a peak in economic activity occurred in the U.S. economy in December 2007. The peak marks the end of the expansion that began in November 2001 and the beginning of a recession. The expansion lasted 73 months; the previous expansion of the 1990s lasted 120 months." This struck me as odd. Not that I don't believe we are in a recession now, but the starting date of December 2007...

It's official: The United States is in a recession -- and it started a year ago. The nation's economy peaked, and the recession began, in December 2007, the National Bureau of Economic Research announced today.

The Successor to Greenspan Has a Very Tough Act to Follow WHEN Alan Greenspan finally retires from the Federal Reserve, will he leave behind any of his DNA? Now in his 18th remarkable year as Fed chairman, the owlish and idiosyncratic Mr. Greenspan is required by law to step down in January 2006. Nominating a successor could be President Bush's biggest economic decision next year, given Mr. Greenspan's mythic reputation as the guardian of price stability and economic growth. A big uncertainty is how any successor will extend Mr. Greenspan's approach to monetary policy, which has been as much an...

The recession that began in March 2001 ended eight months later, the National Bureau of Economic Research, an independent research group that tracks the business cycle, reported today. The announcement, which economists said was not a surprise, may be bittersweet for the millions of Americans without jobs. The previous recession, which lasted from July 1990 to March 1991 in the National Bureau's chronology, was followed by six straight months of job growth a year later. This time, 20 months after the recession's finale, the nation's payrolls are still shrinking. The decision to date the recession's end in November 2001 was...

It has become an article of faith, even among those who really should know better, that we have been in a recession and continue to be in one. A main cause of the confusion is an organization known as The National Bureau of Economic Research (nber.org). This group seems to have appropriated to itself the right to declare the beginning and the end of a recession. This supposedly nonpartisan economic research group has a membership boasting of 12 of 31 past Nobel Prize winners in economics and over 600 university researchers, headquarter in Cambridge, MA (no surprise there), and branches...